ICO Spotlight: Interview with Slavena Savcheva co-Founder of Crowdviz

This post is part of the ICO Spotlight, a series of posts with the teams behind the different projects covered by Coinschedule.

Hello Slavena, it’s great to see you here at the Blockchain World Forum in London. You are the co-founder of CrowdWiz, and it seems things are progressing well, can you tell me more about it? What is CrowdWiz?

Hey Alex, pleasure to see you at this great event. In short, CrowdWiz is a self-governed investment ecosystem that leverages crowd wisdom to empower communities to make smart investment decisions. It is a platform for crowd-sourced and crowd-managed crypto funds or in other words funds with no fund managers.

We are building a technology that addresses many issues and democratizes the investment industry. We have been in fintech for many years now and we have witnessed so many bad practices, but I would like to stress the lack of transparency, middlemen and the high costs that come with them and the agency problem. We have seen the implications of these problems of representative systems again and again in Enron, the global credit crunch, Bernie Madoff’s scheme, just to name a few examples from the recent past. Therefore, aligning the interests of investors and managers, is a key part of our value proposition.

The thing I like about it is the crowd intelligence aspect built into the system. How exactly will it work?

I agree, crowd wisdom is such a powerful concept. A large and diverse enough group can be incredibly smart under the right circumstances. There is a wealth of research showing that averaging the answers of many people is consistently much more accurate than the answer of any individual.

One of my favorite examples because it’s so simple is the TV show Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

The lifeline “Ask the audience” consistently gives a correct answer 91% of the time versus Phone a Friend, where the friend who’s also supposedly an expert has the correct answer only 65% of the time.

So in each crowd-sourced fund (we call them WizFunds) all capital decisions are made collectively by the community. Blockchain allows us now to apply a transparent voting process and remove all middlemen and managers. Not only will this approach save all of the excessive fees but it will also cancel out any individual biases and excessive risk-taking.

How about regulations and legal implications for people setting up funds? Are there any requirements for the ‘fund managers’? Are there any restrictions?

Generally speaking, fund management activities is definitely strictly and heavily regulated area. It’s a subject that we are seriously studying and analyzing and we are in the process of applying with EU regulators. As I mentioned before, the idea of CrowdWiz is to eliminate middlemen and layers of management, including fund managers. We have yet to see how the current regulation, which wasn’t clearly designed to regulate the newly emerging crypto investment funds, would handle this issue. We are lucky to be working with excellent lawyers who are helping us put an appropriate compliance and governance framework in place.

How does CrowdWiz make money?

We have designed the ecosystem in a way to keep the fees at a minimum. We will charge a mandate which is a small fraction of each transaction to cover the execution costs and our monthly maintenance. Our main goal is to keep the value of the WIZ token steadily growing. Since participation in any crowd requires to acquire WIZ, the demand for the token grows proportionately to the number of users. Every new fund will drive the price of WIZ up similarly to how ICOs drive the price of ETH.

Besides, the ecosystem will grow in offerings, modules and users and all it’s components are used exclusively with WIZ which will drive demand and liquidity. Finally, I’d like to say that Crowdwiz is by design a very social and user friendly to allow for easy adoption and low attrition ecosystem which ensures exponential growth.

What can you tell us about you and your team?

Our team is the most important factor to make this project a success. The company that’s behind CrowdWiz is called Krypton.Software and is the crypto division of Tradologic. We’ve been in fintech and retail finance for almost 10 years. We’ve developed enterprise softwares compliant with regulations in Europe, North America and Asia. Together with these people we managed to build a company that now has 7 figure annual profits and we’ve built softwares for dozens of successful companies.

As much as I am convinced that we have a solid project, we have an even more solid team. Michael, my partner, is the rare combo of natural entrepreneur with deep technical knowledge. Alex Lvovich and Dror have quite a track record but most importantly have proved themselves to us and to our partners over the years. The whole R&D team we have in-house is about 60 people and a huge network that trusts in us as a company.

When is the ICO, what’s the duration and mechanics?

The token sale starts on 18th Oct but there will also be a public pre-sale that starts on the 10th and will run for 72 hours. Pre-sale is capped at $10 million and the total hard cap is $20 million.

Alex has a strong background in software development, product and business management. He started mining Bitcoins in 2013 and since then has been involved in several blockchain projects. He participated in some of the the first ever ICOs. He built the official block explorers for two major cryptocurrencies and founded Coinschedule in 2016. Alex is on a mission to eliminate scams from this industry and make ICOs easy and safe.